Two German Giants
Saturday, February 23, 7:30 PM
Shirley Recital Hall, Salem Fine Arts Center
The highlight of the evening will surely be a unique performance of Johannes Brahms’ Requiem, employing the composer’s own four-hand piano accompaniment, making of this beloved masterpiece a work of intimate chamber music. Guest artists will include Mary Mendenhall and John Williams. It will be sung in the English translation of Lara Hoggard (1915-2007), longtime legendary choral conductor at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Brahms will be preceded by Hugo Distler’s Dance of Death, written shortly before the composer’s own death in 1942 at the early age of thirty-six. Based on medieval German texts found in Lübeck, where Distler spent a major part of his career, but sung in a new English translation by Charles Maurer, this fascinating work alternates brief maxims presented by the chorus with spoken dialogs between the personification of Death and an array of twelve different humans; the whole is knit together with interludes from the flute that in the text is Death’s means of summoning humans to their final reckoning. Guest artists will include actor Michael Huie and flutist Laura Dangerfield Stevens.
Director's Notes:
Two German Giants? Certainly nobody would question that description as applied to Johannes Brahms (1833–97). But Hugo Distler? Well, at least some feel that had he lived a full life Distler (1908–42) would have achieved a more considerable reputation, one that now rests on a slender body of choral and organ music, as well as a handful of works for other media written during the eleven years of his active career. Distler, despondent over life in Nazi Germany, committed suicide rather than face conscription into the German army.
The Dance of Death dates from 1934 and was first heard in Lübeck, where Distler was at the time organist of St. James’ Church. However, his inspiration arose from a series of frescos in one of the side chapels of that city’s mammoth church dedicated to Mary. The original concept was that of a round dance, but the fresco depicts a succession of people of various types summoned by Death himself, manifested as a human skeleton, all of this made more explicit through verses in which the doomed converse with Death. In Distler’s realization those dialogues are spoken in poetic paraphrases of the original early German. Death (Michael Huie in our performance) summons ten individuals to their Dance of Death with his flute (played by Laura Stevens), each statement of which introduces a maxim sung by the chorus (with two others that frame the piece), their language drawn from the Cherubic Pilgrim of Johannes Scheffler (1624–77).
PCS has presented the work before, but this performance will introduce a new English translation by Charles Maurer, a former colleague of mine at Denison University. Charles has superbly evoked the flavor and idiom of the original German, creating rhymed, metrical poetry in the dialogues to replace the prose of the published English-language edition. Originally conceived for performance in a church, the ten individuals, ranging from the Kaiser, a doctor and a merchant to a young woman, an old man, and a child, were summoned from the congregation.
Our ten speakers will be seated in the audience and will come forward to receive their sentences, a few of them pretty harsh. Those individuals, most of them cast against type, in the order of their appearance: Peter Juran, Ronald Rinn, Doug Borwick, Keith Kooken, Nigel Alston, William R. Stevens, Kevin Kooken, Richard Schneider, Milton Rhodes, Christine Gorelick, Donald Armitage and Keegan Champion.
A chamber chorus singing the Brahms Requiem? How is that possible? Well, Brahms himself created an accompaniment for four hands at one (our choice) or two pianos, so what you will experience in the hands of Thomas Turnbull and Ivan Seng is not someone’s arrangement of the orchestral score, but Brahms’ own realization in a manner completely idiomatic to the instrument. Admittedly, you will not hear the orchestral colors with which you might be familiar, but I am told by those who have presented the work in this garb that what results is somewhat of a revelation, much more transparent and intimate. Also, note that we are not presenting Ein deutsches Requiem, but will sing an English translation of the original biblical German by Lara Hoggard, the longtime, revered choral conductor at UNC-Chapel Hill, who died only last year.
Purists may scoff, but the intent is to make the experience much more immediate for both performers and listeners. Brahms chose and fitted together texts drawn from both Old and New Testaments, as well as the Apocrypha, and, although he was not overtly a religious man, what results is a major testament of faith, filled with assurances of consolation. The work, Brahms’ largest single piece, was completed in 1866, but reached its final form only in 1869 after he added the present fifth movement in response to his mother’s death, with its heartfelt assurance that “You now are sorrowful, but I will again behold you and then your heart shall be joyful. I will give you comfort as one whom his own mother comforts.” Brahms’ message of comfort is surely one of the supreme expressions of the choral art, and we feel privileged to share it with you.